Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
It is understandable why rights holders equate copyright infringement with theft, since they want to attach the same odium to copyright infringement, presumably in an attempt at simplification as even young children are quickly educated to understand that theft is wrong.
|
Especially since children are also taught that sharing your toys is good. If I have something I'm not using at the moment and someone else wants to use it, I should let them borrow it, right? What if I can let them borrow it and I still have it? What if I can give it to them permanently and still have it? Isn't that basically just the equivalent of sharing your toys without any drawbacks? Everyone wins.
The problem is that someone went to a lot of work creating what you want to share, and they rightly want to be compensated. If we just let everyone share everything, then the only one who loses out is the guy who created it, because he put in a lot of work but gained nothing except what everyone else gets. So he's going to be less likely to put in the work next time.
That's where copyright comes in. It's a compromise. The drawback is that it artificially limits the distribution of what would otherwise be free stuff for everyone. And who doesn't like free stuff? The benefit is that it encourages people to put in the work to create that free stuff in the first place.
In my opinion, copyright isn't about right or wrong; it's about self interest. There's nothing inherently unethical or immoral about sharing an arrangement of bits in a computer. I follow the law not because I'm altruistic, but because I'm selfish. It's in my best interest to encourage a lot of things to be created, because some of those might be things I want to obtain, and I will never obtain something that never gets created. That's just good sense.